


Skin Game

by thedevilchicken



Category: Spy Game (2001)
Genre: Background Het, M/M, Post-Canon, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 14:59:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5502026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tom isn’t sure what he expected from retirement.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Skin Game

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chockers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chockers/gifts).



After Su Chou, Tom didn’t know what to expect.

They didn’t go back to Beirut; the reasons why were pretty obvious. They didn’t go to the States, though Tom thought it might’ve been good to go home for a while, see the ocean, surf, recharge. They couldn’t go to London. So, when the choppers set them down on the base outside Hong Kong, they had to think of someplace new.

Elizabeth voted for Somalia of all the goddamn places and Tom admired her commitment as they sat there in their infirmary beds, but it wasn’t a trip he wanted to take. She said Ethiopia next, then Rwanda, Angola, but in the end they sound up in South Africa as a kind of half-assed compromise. They hooked up with some of Elizabeth’s old acquaintances and started bringing aid to small communities, urban as well as rural, parcels of food and medicine stacked up in the back of a canvas-topped truck that was older than they were put together till the rear axle started to give with the weight. They did good there, Tom thinks now, maybe more good than he ever did in the Marines or in the CIA. And when Elizabeth smiled at him, he thought maybe it was all worthwhile just for that.

Except he couldn’t forget Nathan. He couldn’t forget what Nathan had done for him, and it wasn’t even like he didn’t try.

Their place in the city was a small, stark bedroom with a kitchen hitched on that they couldn’t fit in both together and a bathroom where the faucet spat more rust than water. Elizabeth would go up onto the roof of their building in the afternoons to read under a shabby parasol that might’ve been white once but maybe wasn’t, and Tom would stay inside with the shutters closed and sweat into his shirt in the oppressive heat as he pinned up new maps or new faxes or notes scribbled on napkins in shitty cafés under a photograph of Nathan Muir. He’d turned it around after he’d caught Elizabeth scowling at it, pinned it up with Nathan’s face to the wall, but he knew what was there anyway because he knew every line on Nathan’s face.

It pissed him off but he saw her point because Nathan pissed him off, too. He’d really fucked her over back in Beirut, they both knew he’d traded her to the Chinese, and saving her in China had been more like collateral damage than design.

But Nathan _had_ saved her. More than anything back then, Tom remembers how he was grateful for that, even if he knew and he knows that she’d never been the objective, at least not _Nathan’s_ objective. She’d have died there in China in that stinking hole of a cell without Nathan’s help and he’d have never seen her again, probably because he’d have been put up against a wall with his head in a bag and then shot to death.

And then, eight months later, he found him.

“Just go, will you,” Elizabeth said, looking at him from the bed they’d shared. He remembers how her hair had grown out again, bit by bit, over the months, till it was back down to her shoulders like it was then. He remembers how in the sheen of sweat on her bare skin in the late afternoon sun, she was as beautiful as she’d ever been, even with the scars of China on her skin. He didn’t want to leave her. He knew she shouldn’t wait for him, but he knew she wouldn’t have been the woman he’d risked his life for if she had.

He’d burned all his notes in the kitchen sink and the apartment smelled like fire and ash. It smelled like Beirut after the bomb.

“Thank you,” he said, by the door already as she left the bed. She smiled; he didn’t.

He left her there, tying up her hair by the window. She didn’t turn back to watch him leave. He didn’t say he wasn’t coming back; she didn’t ask.

\---

“What took you so long?” Nathan said, as Tom pulled out the chair opposite his at the café table and took a seat. “Were you not listening when I taught you everything I know? I thought I did a pretty good job.”

Nathan took a sip of his coffee and set it down on top of a copy of _Le Monde_. The smug bastard spoke six languages that Tom knew of. Tom had only ever learned German and the dirty words in Vietnamese, not that that meant anything.

“What makes you think I was looking for you, old man?” Tom said. “You’ve got a face only a mother could love, you know that.” But he let his smile give him away.

“Oh, you were looking,” Nathan said. “I bet you thought I wouldn’t know.” He took off his glasses and tucked them into the breast pocket of his suit, under his overcoat. Then he pulled up his scarf against the chill.

“Yeah, you haven’t changed,” Tom said, but he knew that was a lie because Nathan was using the flask he’d given him back in Beirut to weight down his newspaper against the brisk whip of the wind.

“Did I ever say I would?” Nathan said. Tom guessed he hadn’t said it. That didn’t mean he hadn’t done it anyway.

Tom ordered a coffee and they sat there outside in the pale early morning sun, watching commuters emerge from the nearby metro station to bustle down the streets. Nathan’s gaze was on him but Tom knew he’d seen the waitress trip and almost fall inside the door, the guy at the next table reading Playboy inside his newspaper, the car parked across the street that might’ve been suspicious if the driver hadn’t clearly been trailing a well-dressed middle-aged brunette having breakfast with a younger man. Nathan was better than anyone else in the game, Tom knew that. Unless he’d finally lost his edge, and Tom did have to wonder. He’d come all the way from South Africa to find out.

Tom was alive, after all. He was alive when he should’ve been dead in a Chinese prison with a bullet in his head, and Nathan was the reason why.

“Why did you do it?” Tom asked.

“Let’s take a walk,” Nathan said. It wasn’t the response he’d hoped for but he guesses now that it was pretty much what he’d expected.

Paris was cold then in early December, colder than Tom could recall since back in the day, back on the job, back in East Germany. He didn’t miss Berlin, he told himself as they walked by the river, and he still doesn’t now. He didn’t miss the runs for the border, the games they played, as they crossed an old stone bridge and paused, both leaning against the wall on their forearms in their coats and gloves and scarves.

“Why did you do it?” Tom asked again, the first few drops of cold rain stinging in his eyes.

“Maybe your bad attitude finally rubbed off on me, boy scout,” Nathan said, as he looked out over the river.

“Bullshit.”

“So tell me what _you_ think.”

Tom laughed and shook his head and walked away. Nathan didn’t follow.

\---

Two days later, Tom came back to the hotel to find Nathan in his room sometime past 9pm. He hadn’t been totally sure he’d ever see him again. He hadn’t been totally sure he wanted to; the bastard was just as fucking obtuse as he’d always been.

“When did you quit taking precautions?” Nathan asked, as Tom started to take off his coat. He stood. “No, leave it on. We’re going out.”

He was staying in a shitty hotel in the Marais, down a side street full of residents’ shitty scooters. They scooted around them and out into the square at the end of the street as Nathan pulled up his collar against the cold and Tom zipped up his jacket under his chin. He didn’t ask where they were going; Nathan didn’t volunteer that intel.

They walked for over an hour. Tom catalogued the streets, names on signs and landmarks, every turn they took, not even consciously in the start but it wasn’t a surprise to him that he did it. Nathan really had taught him well, at least the mechanisms of it, the skills, if not the important part that involved shoving your morals down under an unhealthy dose of pseudo-patriotism because screwing over his assets had never gotten easier when they were all ten times braver than he ever was.

_If it comes down to you or them, send flowers_ , Nathan had told him back in Berlin. So he’d taken him at his word even though he knew he was just being fucking dry, and over the years Tom has sent more goddamn flowers than he knows how to count. He doesn’t want to try.

They stopped. Nathan slowed and stopped and so Tom stopped with him as Nathan fished a set of keys from the pocket of his overcoat.

“This is my place,” Nathan said, waving up at the apartments above. “Come by in the morning. I make a pretty great omelet.” And he left Tom there on the sidewalk as he disappeared inside.

He told himself he wasn’t going back there when he caught a cab back to his hotel, but he was there by the door again just after 8am.

“You leaving?” Nathan asked when he opened the door, nodding to the duffel slung over Tom’s shoulder.

“I’m staying,” Tom said, and shouldered in past him through the door. He dropped his back just inside, everything he owned that was worth taking with him all stored there inside it, and Nathan laughed but didn’t tell him to go. “You said something about breakfast, right?”

So Nathan cooked and they ate together at his kitchen table. He turned out to be a pretty good cook. And it turned out there was even a second bedroom where Tom could bunk, which was better than the prospect of the couch he’d expected.

Tom got himself a job three days later, working the bar in a restaurant. Nathan was awake every night when he came in after work, reading a book on the couch under the window in his glasses. He’d look up and nod and then head away to bed and Tom would do the same, wondering how the hell Nathan Muir had afforded retirement like this, how he’d managed to go off the damn grid while living in Paris and not some tiny island where no one could find him. He knew the CIA was pretty pissed, but in the end he guessed they’d had to sweep it all under the rug or pretty much go to war with China. Nathan had always been a sneaky son of a bitch. He played the odds. He usually won.

“You could’ve just sent flowers,” Tom said, at breakfast three weeks later when he still hadn’t left.

Nathan looked at him over the top of the table, over the top of their coffee and toast, over the top of his glasses. He paused. He looked at him, his expression unreadable though these days Tom’s not sure if he couldn’t read it or if he just didn’t want to.

“So could you,” Nathan said.

Tom understood.

\---

He’d been in Paris for two months when Nathan sat him down to talk.

One of the reasons Nathan had picked him for the job in the first place was his memory. Nathan trained him to train it but he’d always had a head for telephone numbers and license plates, street names and maps. When Nathan told him the account numbers that night when he came in from work, they both knew he’d remember them. That was the point.

“My source said you’d cleared all your accounts,” Tom said after, sitting there on the couch in Nathan’s place, the kind of place that seemed homely till you realized it said nothing at all about its owner.

Nathan smiled wryly. “Sure I did,” he said. “The ones they knew about.”

And that made sense, Tom guessed. $282k had only been the ceiling on his funds to make it look good, to make it seem plausible long enough to save Tom Bishop’s life. Nathan had always had contingencies for his contingencies, and had told Tom to put his own in place, too. He’d had 24 hours to pull Tom out of China and he’d made it happen; it’s always been tough to imagine what he’d had time to do in the span of a whole career.

“So, that’s everything?” Tom asked.

“That’s everything,” Nathan confirmed. “Just in case.”

“And if I hop on the next flight to the Caymans and clear you out?”

Nathan shrugged. “Then I don’t know you half as well as I think I do,” he said.

Tom didn’t say he was right. Tom didn’t say he was wrong. He didn’t question why Nathan had let him find him then let him stay because he didn’t question for a second that Nathan could’ve been gone for good if he’d wanted to. Even Tom would never have found him. But now he was giving him his secrets and Tom’s chest felt tight. He didn’t understand and hated the fact that he didn’t.

“Is all of this still a game to you?” Tom asked.

“Sure,” Nathan said. “The stakes are high and the odds aren’t in our favor but you knew that from the start.”

“Then I guess you’ve got a hell of a poker face, old man.”

Nathan had that same unreadable look again, not for the first time, not for the third or the fifth or the twentieth time. “It’s kept me in the game so far,” he said.

Tom went to bed. He tried not to consider the way Nathan had looked at him. He tried not to consider that Nathan’s goddamn poker face had hidden it all along until he’d sent SEALs to pull Tom away from a firing squad.

It had. The next morning at breakfast he knew it because Nathan was watching him over the table the way he always did, the way he had since the start. He’d left everyone behind but Tom. For Tom, he’d burned bridges. For Tom, he’d’ve started a goddamn war. And the irony of it was Tom knew he’d’ve done the same thing; he’d left Elizabeth, after all.

“What happened to the dream house?” Tom asked. “White sand beaches and piña coladas and all that shit?”

Nathan smiled as he folded his newspaper neatly on the tabletop. Not a lot about the guy was neat back then and not a lot is these days either, but somehow his newspapers were always immaculate. “Surely you don’t believe I blew it on your get out of jail free card?”

“Not for a damn second.”

“Then I guess you’re smarter than you look.”

Tom paused. Nathan watched him pause, and Tom could see him try to divine the meaning of it.

“So what are you waiting for?” he asked.

Nathan chuckled. He looked down at his plate, rearranging his knife and fork in a way that wasn’t exactly reminiscent of his poker face. Then he looked back up, across the table, straight at Tom, and it was all written right there whether he meant it to be or not. For a second, Nathan Muir was an open book. Tom could’ve laughed out loud.

“I guess I was waiting for the right time,” he said. Tom knew what he meant.

“Then what are _we_ waiting for?” Tom said. “Let’s go.”

\---

Tom isn’t sure what he expected from retirement. Maybe a wife and three kids and a white picket fence, a dog he’d walk every morning and not have to remember all the lies he’d told and who he’d told them to. Maybe he never expected retirement would come at all, that he’d be CIA till the day he died, be that old age in some Florida retirement community for the guys who knew where the bodies were buried or in twenty minutes’ time in some bombing or with a bullet in the back of the head.

What he didn’t expect was a house on a beach in Jamaica, a beaten up fishing boat and Nathan Muir in a panama hat.

“You look like a shitty spy thriller cliché,” Tom told him the first time he put it on, on the patio that looked out onto the beach.

“I was CIA for thirty years,” Nathan said, not quite managing to sound more defensive than amused. “I _am_ a damn cliché.” And it made sense but didn’t stop Tom from snatching the hat and hightailing it out of there. Nathan followed close behind, tackled him to the ground out there on the beach’s hot sand.

“You’re pretty fast for an old guy,” Tom said, twisting onto his back. And he flung the hat out into the sea.

“What are you, twelve?” Nathan said, watching the hat bob on the waves and then start to sink, and he might’ve gone on, propped up awkwardly half on top of him, but Tom yanked him down into a kiss. That put an end to the conversation. He hadn’t even meant to do it but it’s not turned out to be the worst idea he’s ever had.

He isn’t sure what he expected from retirement but his hands under Nathan’s shirt wasn’t it. Nathan’s mouth on his neck wasn’t it, or the burn of Nathan’s day-old stubble against his collarbones as Nathan tugged down his collar and pressed his mouth there, too. He hadn’t expected Nathan’s hands on him or his hands on Nathan; he couldn’t even recall when that’d started to seem like a good idea to him except maybe it had always been that way, since the start, since they’d met all those years ago in Vietnam or maybe Germany after though he knows Germany before Nathan was all just part of a twisted recruitment pitch. Nathan’s never confirmed or denied but it seems like the truth. But they pushed and pulled and snickered their way into the master bedroom that first afternoon and Tom hasn’t slept in the guest room since.

Sometimes, he thinks about Elizabeth. He wonders where she is, what she’s doing, if she’s ever found someone, but guesses in the end it doesn’t matter - Elizabeth will always be Elizabeth, she’ll always have a cause and that cause will always come first, no matter what. He still admires that about her, because he knows it’s never been about the cause for him; it’s about Nathan’s fucking game. When he thinks about it, in the end, he thinks maybe he admired her more than he loved her.

A month turned to six turned to a year then two then six. The lines on Nathan’s face have started to multiply but that’s fine, he’s still familiar in every way from the bridge of his nose where his glasses press when he remembers to wear them to three scars on his chest where he got shot in Korea. He knows Nathan’s hands, the scar on his left palm from a knife fight, how his wrist aches in the cold from three separate fractures. he knows the arch of his feet and the curve of his thighs, the weight of his cock against his belly or his palm when they’re on top of the sheets in the afternoon sun. He knows Nathan’s mouth, in ways he never knew he really wanted to before. He’d thought they’d just been fantasies. Apparently, he’d wanted more.

“Harry Duncan called,” Nathan says, joining Tom on the patio as he cleans his rifle. “How about a trip to Argentina?”

Tom laughs as he starts reassembly. Maybe they’re retired but they’re not exactly out of the game; he thinks they’ll have to die first and they probably will.

“Sure,” he says. “Tell Harry Boy Scout says hey.” And Nathan nods as he leans against the doorjamb, watching him work.

Sometimes he thinks this is all exactly the way Nathan planned it all along, that after he set up Elizabeth this was all his endgame and the bullshit with Su Chou just condensed the timeline a little, pushed everything up. Maybe Nathan was working him all along and all the plans were in place because damn, when did Noah build the ark, how many times has he said it? Before the rain, Tom. _Before_ the rain.

But there’s that look on Nathan’s face sometimes just like there is now. He’ll look at him and Tom remembers the day in the chopper, beaten half to death and bleeding but alive. he remembers the instant he knew that Nathan Muir was the one who’d saved his life and broken every one of his own rules to do it. He could fucking cry sometimes when he thinks about it.

They’ll leave in the morning, Tom thinks, and maybe they’ll be gone for two days or maybe it’ll be two weeks before they’re back home. They work well together now they’re equals. But right now they’ll go inside and Tom will sit there in the kitchen watching Nathan cook. They’ll eat and they’ll talk because they can talk for hours, they can mock each other for hours or flirt or they can talk politics and till they’re ready to come to blows, and then they’ll go to bed - maybe nothing else will happen, maybe Nathan will read for an hour while Tom falls asleep. Maybe he’ll fish away Nathan’s book and lose his page the way he always does and kiss him, maybe he’ll push him down on his back and relearn the contours of his hipbones while he’s sucking him off the way he does sometimes, languid and lazy. Maybe he’ll push inside him and they’ll do it in the dark, under the sheets, on their sides with Tom’s chest pushed tight and sweat-slicked up to Nathan’s back or maybe Nathan will push up Tom’s knees and they’ll do it face to face, hot and close and breathless.

Sometimes, after, he can even get Nathan to talk about his past and not just the fragments of the past they’ve shared. Sometimes, he thinks Nathan wants this at least as much as he does, though they’ll never say the words out loud.

They’ll leave tomorrow, Tom thinks, retired or not. This is the life they’ve made. He’s happy. Maybe one day he’ll even manage to tell Nathan thank you for day he saved his life.

And if Nathan played a game to get him here then maybe, just maybe, Tom just doesn’t care.


End file.
